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Let's Play Every Final Fantasy Game In Order Of Release [Now Finished: Final Fantasy Tactics]

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Adloquium said:
That's accurate, yes. As mentioned upthread, Chrono Trigger does interesting and useful things with the ATB system. There may be other, further uses for ATB that make it a good choice for the combat system.

Final Fantasy, as we've seen up until now, just doesn't do any of it.
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Yeah honestly? This is what a big part of it comes down to for me. I wouldn't call ATB inherently a bad system, there's ways to make it interesting like Chrono Trigger, or apparently Grandia. But the games Omi has been playing from FFIV to FFVIII don't really do anything particularly interesting with it beyond the occasional "WATCH OUT THE BOSS WENT INTO COUNTER STANCE, BETTER WAIT 20 SECONDS BEFORE YOU DO ANYTHING".

I'd much rather play a refined turn based system or something else by comparison. Etrian Odyssey is a game where everyone selects their actions then goes the way FFI to FFIII work, but implements things like buffs and debuffs lasting a specific amount of turns that you can check, and not being able to stack more than 3 of each. Bravely Default is basically "What if Final Fantasy V but modernized and turn based", but also the Brave/Default system lets you go into turn debt (or save up turns) for extra moves, doing things like "My character takes 4 turns RIGHT NOW but then can't do anything for the next 3 turns", and that's not even getting into the BP-gain combos you can cheese with using some class combinations. That's just off the top of my head, there's sure to be other examples of taking a classic turn based system and iterating on it to be more exciting (or iterating on ATB to be more exciting, or even just entirely different RPG combat systems).
 
RE the ATB discussion: I hate to bring it up again, but I think one of the most interesting uses of it is in Parasite Eve. It combines Resident Evil style prerendered backgrounds and fixed camera angles with active control of your character allowing you to maneuver around enemy attacks SHMUP style. The actual ATB element is also paired with location based attacks (at least for some enemies), so you're not always just mindlessly attacking. I'd love to see that style of RPG make a return someday.
 
So, I think a point should be made of why FF8 specifically suffers from using ATB, although I find this is the core problem:
You often times know what you are doing next, and all it adds to the fight is a timer you need to wait for, that will then be followed by an animation that could be quite long.


Let's use an example: You are in a battle with an enemy with some spell you want to Draw.
1 - Wait for first turn, this is a time period you cannot do anything and are just watching the standard idle motions of the combatants.
2 - Menu to Draw, then target the correct enemy, then select the correct spell, then select Stock. This may or may not happen while the battle progresses depending on settings.
3 - Wait a bit longer for the command to process, optionally for the enemy to take an action.
4 - Watch the Draw animation, this is a second or two long and unskippable, does not contribute to anything but time limits.
5 - Wait for your next character's turn, if you didn't have the menus set to pause this will often be immediately afterwards because the menuing takes that long.
6 - Repeat steps 2 through 5 until fully stocked will all relevant spells.
7 - Actually do the battle part, this is only different in that there is slightly less menu access unless you want to cast a spell.

Now, between the Draw animations the ATB system makes you sit there and watch idle animations most of the time. You know what you are doing, the enemy acts automatically, but nobody can make it go faster because there are animations to show off.


ATB's downside, and honestly the downside of quite a few real time systems, is that there is downtime where you cannot really do anything but wait to progress. Compared to turn based systems that progress as fast as you can select options and the game can process. Where you can in fact layer turns based on speed, and I would not be surprised if games older than FF8 have done so, just by having it so the game tracks which character would act next and give them an action at the appropriate time.
 
For ATB, I quite liked Linion and its (now vanished) expansion. I remember speedrunning to the endgame enemies as a small child and memorizing the patterns to kill them and get my sick loot.
 
Is all this spoiler discussion of things that will happen in games that the thread hasn't reached yet allowed? I thought it was against thread rules. Did I miss something?
 
I'm less of a stickler for strict system spoilers than I am for narrative ones but please keep in mind that going into each game with a fresh eye and getting to find out how it iterates on the FF formula is part of the fun, so please avoid comments to the effect of "FF IX/X/XII works like this/has ATB/is turn-based." I've been less attentive to curating discussion because I'm on break but please be mindful.

Talking about games that aren't part of the Final Fantasy series like Xenogears or Grandia is fine.
 
Omicron said:
I'm less of a stickler for strict system spoilers than I am for narrative ones but please keep in mind that going into each game with a fresh eye and getting to find out how it iterates on the FF formula is part of the fun, so please avoid comments to the effect of "FF IX/X/XII works like this/has ATB/is turn-based." I've been less attentive to curating discussion because I'm on break but please be mindful.

Talking about games that aren't part of the Final Fantasy series like Xenogears or Grandia is fine.
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Xenogears weird, because its scrapped ff7 script, of course I'm saying this out of intellectual need for accuracy and not because I'm a xenogears superfan imao and so I want it to count for this retrospective. It might be double or triple the wordcount of ff8 analysis if you went for it though theres a lategame moment where theres so much text the speech bubble size briefly changes imao.
Saint_007 said:
I'm intrigued to see how a Tactics game can work out. IT can be pretty deep, but it seems like an interesting game to dissect. Though I wonder how Omi as a French person would feel about a game that's a fantasy version of the English collapse following the failed 100 years war.

It's not so much the "more timewasting!" thing, it's how it was presented. It just felt rushed after how big the first disk was. Maybe 60-80% of the plot was on the first disk by some miracle of compressed coding and optimization, but the second disk was literally three dungeons in between massive walls of exposition, showing rather than telling.

I have a feeling that a piece of bullshit at the end was going to happen anyways (One of the ones responsible for the plot gets forgiven even though he has no right to be forgiven), but that's just story.
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The thing with xenogears is that while we kinda skim some step to get to the endgame I feel like the endgame is strong enough that I'm willing to overlook it, reminds of someone who said that the two strongest impressions media can leave is the beginning and the end and I feel xenogears passes with flying colours on that front seeing all the payoffs is a blast.
Tactics will be a blast to see though I worry somewhat on the game being somewhat obtuse to a first timer, there's a certain important lategame boss thats kinda infamous for how much a noob trap they are. I sure as hell had a close call there. Not sure how much the thread should actually chime in on explaining stuff tbh given that and there being some exploits in the game that can snap it in two.
On active battle system its not offensive but its never really anything much mechanically(then again final fantasy games have ever been particularly hard), beyond being the cacus belli for suits to force the series from functionally a turn based rpg into a action rpg, which is at the heart of a major series schism.
 
Xenogears' saving grace is that, by the time of disc 2, most of the character growths, backstory reveals, plot twists and so on managed to be developed. So the only job left for disc 2 was moving from setpiece to setpiece to keep with the plot, and still allowed for some decent bosses and overworld sidequesting. The framing hurts it, yes, but it's not a catastrophe.

What it could have been, though... *longingly stares at the infinite*
 
dreameater said:
The thing with xenogears is that while we kinda skim some step to get to the endgame I feel like the endgame is strong enough that I'm willing to overlook it, reminds of someone who said that the two strongest impressions media can leave is the beginning and the end and I feel xenogears passes with flying colours on that front
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The analysis pointed out that FFVIII also has an excellent beginning and end, which leave a very strong impression; that didn't seem to save it from being considered not up to par by most posters on the thread. I don't see why Xenogears would fare any better - the overall plot might be somewhat more coherent, but it has a lot of holes too, and the gameplay in Disc 2 of Xenogears is certainly worse than the gameplay in FFVIII, I don't think that can be argued. So, the end result of any analysis would be that Xenogears is like FFVIII - excellent start, strong ending, a big mess in the middle, and the game is overall unfinished.
 
Egleris said:
The analysis pointed out that FFVIII also has an excellent beginning and end, which leave a very strong impression; that didn't seem to save it from being considered not up to par by most posters on the thread. I don't see why Xenogears would fare any better - the overall plot might be somewhat more coherent, but it has a lot of holes too, and the gameplay in Disc 2 of Xenogears is certainly worse than the gameplay in FFVIII, I don't think that can be argued. So, the end result of any analysis would be that Xenogears is like FFVIII - excellent start, strong ending, a big mess in the middle, and the game is overall unfinished.
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The difference is that you can see exactly where they ran out of time and budget in Xenogears. The game looking you directly in the eyes and going "we're sorry, but we're not able to finish the story so here's the cliff notes of what happened" makes you a lot more forgiving of the faults, especially since the story's still okay.

Also Xenogears doesn't suck to play.
 
Indivisible said:
Child of Light had an interesting variant of the ATB system, where if you attack enemies right before they attack, it sets them back in their ATB timer.
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That's basically how Grandia did things too, though from memory you needed a specific sort of attack to do that than, rather just the regular one
 
GilliamYaeger said:
The difference is that you can see exactly where they ran out of time and budget in Xenogears. The game looking you directly in the eyes and going "we're sorry, but we're not able to finish the story so here's the cliff notes of what happened" makes you a lot more forgiving of the faults, especially since the story's still okay.

Also Xenogears doesn't suck to play.
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On the latter, you need to remember that I've stated repeatedly that FFVIII is the game I have most fun playing; I think it doesn't suck to play. It has issue, but solving the issues is part of the fun for me. And even if you dislike it, it's still perfectly serviceable gameplay - as I mentioned when people compared it to Drakengard, it's nowhere near the level that playing it is a torture; it's broken, easily exploitable, and sometimes dull (if you don't enjoy engaging with the issues it has), but it's perfectly serviceable as gameplay for a videogame. The second disk of Xenogears is NOT serviceable gameplay for a videogame.

As in: if you bought a game and the gameplay in it was the gameplay of FFVIII, with none of FFVIII redeeming features on other fronts like the romance or presentation, it'd still be a playable game, if one not for everyone. If you bought a game and the gameplay was that of the second disk of Xenogears, you'd be fully entitled to demand your money back, and likely furious.

On the other point: I understand perfectly that a "we're not finishing this in protest for having our budget cut/our schedule rushed" is a respectable position. I certainly respect House of the Dragon for going that route, and I can have some respect for Xenogears doing the same. Having said that, it's not like what FFVIII used to fill the middle of itself is terrible; it's average, but once again, serviceable. They put in enough effort to present a product that can be considered completed and mostly hold together, meaning they choose to put the final game ahead of their own desires. FFVIII is incomplete, but it tries not to be; Xenogears doesn't even try, and while I appreciate that as an artistic choice, it makes it an inferior product.

Any comparison of FFVIII that considers it bad for being incomplete cannot escape the fact that, by that same metric, Xenogears is worse. FFVIII is a game with holes, but Xenogears is only half a game, and the fact that this was a protest doesn't change that the end result is still only half a game.
 
Egleris said:
The analysis pointed out that FFVIII also has an excellent beginning and end, which leave a very strong impression; that didn't seem to save it from being considered not up to par by most posters on the thread. I don't see why Xenogears would fare any better - the overall plot might be somewhat more coherent, but it has a lot of holes too, and the gameplay in Disc 2 of Xenogears is certainly worse than the gameplay in FFVIII, I don't think that can be argued. So, the end result of any analysis would be that Xenogears is like FFVIII - excellent start, strong ending, a big mess in the middle, and the game is overall unfinished.
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Gears plot is pretty airtight imo unlike ff8 the plot does really come together at the end. The villains of gears are almost the opposite of ff8's roster in terms of quality Ramsus, Grahf ,ID and Krelian all have oodles of material exploring them as antagonists, Miangs fine enough but never really comes off as bad as the narrative doesn't clinch too much time on it for it to be a problem, she never has a ultimecia problem at the least her motives are quite firmly explained, Krelian fills in for the final stretch when the mystery isnt there anymore and they need an emotional climax . Its not exactly fair tho because gears villains where so good they revamped the concepts in newer games made by the writter. I do wish Krelians PW backstory was put somewhere in the game tho it adds some really nice touches to him on top of whats there.

Additionally after the final dungeon of disc 1 I felt kinda done with xenogears from a gameplay pov so I didn't really feel like I missed much aside from the way the plot is truncated tbh, your basically near capped by the end of disc 1 particularly if you bought a ether doubler early, in practice the games near over from a gameplay pov. Disc 2 is preety darn short particularly if you cut all the custcenes out, its less like the middle is messy and more like 3 quaters are rote jrpg, and then suddently you go spend couple hours doing a truncated plot visual novel before arriving back to normal for endgame.

Is disc 2 kinda messy sure does it still leave an impression also yes. People cut xenogears a lot of slack for the quality of its story, that feels constrained by the videogame frame its attached to at times.
 
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E.I.G. said:
ATB's downside, and honestly the downside of quite a few real time systems, is that there is downtime where you cannot really do anything but wait to progress. Compared to turn based systems that progress as fast as you can select options and the game can process. Where you can in fact layer turns based on speed, and I would not be surprised if games older than FF8 have done so, just by having it so the game tracks which character would act next and give them an action at the appropriate time.
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I prefer phase and turn based systems too but this is just poor criticism, these days TB has just as many animations as ATB, if not more. It's the extra seconds waiting "for your turn" that it theoretically doesn't have, and in reality often does because the CPU is straining with pathfinding, goal oriented ai, idle animations etc. the way square uses ATB to "waste time" filing up a timer, usually is nothing to waiting for a complex strategical or tactics game suffering under the weight of computing the next step of the simulation when there is much more to track and animate that that wasted time is very very minor. Granted that is not the case in these games types Square did at this time.

It adds up certainly, and I'd prefer if all games using ATB without movement would have the option to turn it off, but it was a minor annoyance even then. I suspect they did it for "cinematics" actually (animations), then they did nothing with it they couldn't already do (idle animations with short interrupt loops, instead of say, a animation of a party member getting knocked down then raising themselves as the bar fills).

dreameater said:
Is disc 2 kinda messy sure does it still leave an impression also yes. People cut xenogears a lot of slack for the quality of its story, that feels constrained by the videogame frame its attached to at times.
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I like Xenogears a lot... but I didn't think it has a "great" story. It's a bit like a encyclopedia of scifi tropes at times and you're zooming through that encyclopedia at a pretty fast clip, stopping rarely to let them breathe and affect the rest of the game. Destroyed hometown. Amnesia. Mechs. Sky pirates. Ancient ruins. Ancient Mechs. Conspiracy theocracy. Prison level, martial arts of supernatural power, flying city, i am your father, soylent green incorporated, reincarnation\ancient planetfall etc etc.

It's like if square tried to fit in all the tropes it could in a single game. Sometimes it worked, sometimes I thought the director needed to chill out. Pretty impressive game technically and I loved some of the soundtrack though. Zooming in those paintings in the first scene set the standard.
 
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SCO said:
I like Xenogears a lot... but I didn't think it has a "great" story. It's a bit like a encyclopedia of scifi tropes at times and you're zooming through that encyclopedia at a pretty fast clip, stopping rarely to let them breathe and affect the rest of the game. Destroyed hometown. Amnesia. Mechs. Sky pirates. Ancient ruins. Ancient Mechs. Conspiracy theocracy. Prison level, martial arts of supernatural power, flying city, i am your father, reincarnation\ancient planetfall etc etc.

It's like if square tried to fit in all the tropes it could in a single game. Sometimes it worked, sometimes I thought the director needed to chill out. Pretty impressive game technically and I loved some of the soundtrack though. Zooming in those paintings in the first scene set the standard.
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The game get away with it suspect off the back of the scope of the story being so big they have a silmarillion esque sourcebook called perfect works. The only time I felt it was a little on the nose was the disc 1 final dungeon name, but I can't hate it for that because it gives Citan his most infamous moment you know the one I dont even have to say it imao. It uses a lot of tropes but it the ones it dwell on it does do in unique ways that showed the devs did their homework lots of gnosticism and freud stuff to be sure, some other 19th century works and a villain inspired by childhoods end plus mecha's for rule of cool of course.
 
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Indivisible said:
Child of Light had an interesting variant of the ATB system, where if you attack enemies right before they attack, it sets them back in their ATB timer.
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It's similar to Blue Reflection (technically attacks in BR require a delay value to set enemies back, but all attacks in BR have a delay value anyway), but I did consider it pseudo-ATB because it actually works more like a timeline system, like in the Trails series.

As in the one bit of ATB included in Child Of Light and Blue Reflection is having to wait for the "ATB Gauge" to fill (more precisely the character icons on the action bar indicating how close they are to their turns). Apart from that, the system could be reimagined to be a timeline system where everyone's turns are laid out in a static display, along with the ability for each participant in the fight to manipulate the turn order.

To illustrate, compare the idea of "set the enemy back in their ATB timer" with "set the enemy's turn later in the order". The former is what the pseudo-ATB of Child Of Light does, while the latter is what Trails does, like the "easy exploit" of Rean Delay spamming in Trails Of Cold Steel. The net effect is the same, as is likely the calculations on the back end; it's just the pseudo-ATB obfuscates the presentation for the player. Again, I speculate without proof that it's at least partly to make the battle seem more dynamic.

I don't consider it "true" ATB because unlike what we've seen in Final Fantasy, we cannot wait for more than one character to have their ATB gauge fill up. Once a character gets a turn, that character has to make an action, even if it's "skip turn/defend", while the ATB pauses for everyone else.

(A hypothetical game probably can make a "true" ATB system with the singular gauge as its presentation. It's probably just nonexistent or very rare because games are moving away from ATB.)
 
SCO said:
I prefer phase and turn based systems too but this is just poor criticism, these days TB has just as many animations as ATB, if not more. It's the extra seconds waiting "for your turn" that it theoretically doesn't have, and in reality often does because the CPU is straining with pathfinding, goal oriented ai, idle animations etc. the way square uses ATB to "waste time" filing up a timer, usually is nothing to waiting for a complex strategical or tactics game suffering under the weight of computing the next step of the simulation when there is much more to track and animate that that wasted time is very very minor. Granted that is not the case in these games types Square did at this time.

It adds up certainly, and I'd prefer if all games using ATB without movement would have the option to turn it off, but it was a minor annoyance even then. I suspect they did it for "cinematics" actually (animations), then they did nothing with it they couldn't already do (idle animations with short interrupt loops, instead of say, a animation of a party member getting knocked down then raising themselves as the bar fills).
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If a turn based game doesn't have a snappy enough animation set, and also doesn't let me turn those animations off, then I kind of hate it more than I merely dislike ATB.
You are in fact describing how the modern "make graphics pretty" development ideology can ruin turn based stuff.

Also, I have no idea what sort of turn based games you are talking about that need to do that much computation each turn on modern systems. I didn't think they made turn based high detail simulation games to that degree.
 
The thing with active battle is its not really impressive and kinda more a visual flair, but also not one that is very hard to mostly ignore. I prefer pure turn based on principle but it doesn't add much nor does it takeaway much aside from its use in chrono trigger where it actually is really neat.
 
Wiadi said:
This I think is broadly fair, but without getting too speculative, it seems at least plausible to me that this is an issue of a concept being hamstrung by technical details and then being compromised to mitigate them.
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I'm coming back to this due to a shower thought I had while pondering: what would a "speed chess" concept similar to ATB be if it wasn't hamstrung by the technical limitations of Final Fantasy's menu navigation?

And then I realized a potential answer: FFXIV.

The ATB is the GCD.
 
ATB as the FF games played so far have done it is just the worst of both worlds of turn based and realtime. If you wanted a dynamic turn order affected by an action speed stat, you can do that with turn based. Others have mentioned the 'portrtaits along the top/side of the screen showing turn order' thing that a lot of games do to show this visually. It also adds a degree of unpleasant pressure to menu decisions, though at least 8 isn't the worst for it AFAICT. We'll get there!

It's made worse by the fact that there's no simulated 'selection time' that your enemies have to suffer under. Their turn comes up, they immediately act, whereas you have to flick through options and find the right one first. That means if you don't make the sane choice of picking 'wait' - or if the game doesn't have that option - you can end up getting battered to pieces while you fumble through the menus.

It's not like you can freely move about the battlefield while the bar's charging or anything to dodge AoE attacks or similar, either.

Now, there are plenty of games that do an ATB-style thing that works alright! They're usually ARPGS with cooldowns, because that's what an ATB is - it's a cooldown. It's basically the GCD, the baseline 'you can only do stuff this quick' limiter. Notably the games that do it right tend to have a lot of movement and so on independent of your cooldowns. Like, I dunno, FFXIV or WoW, for example, or Diablo or Grim Dawn.

You can even do it right with games like FF; you just need to auto-pause the battle while the turn is up so that the player can make choices! Grandia does this. Chrono Trigger does not, contrary to what others have said, even with the wait option; you need to get into one of the submenus for the wait option to activate, in fact. At least with the PC version. Of course, this then begs the question of 'why have the ATB charge then' to which the answer is 'don't, unless you have a far more dynamic turn order system like Grandia where your actions and enemy actions can rearrange the turn order so you need some time for those actions to execute to create a tactical layer'.

(And if this makes you ask 'but Kadmus, doesn't that mean you want ATB to basically be turn based' then yes, you have divined my intent correctly. Turn based is strictly superior to the pseudo-realtime a lot of FF games badly aim for. And, again, you can have dynamic turn based with multiple actions for certain characters per 'round', and so on. You can even have a Grandia-style extremely dynamic turn order with heavy attacks cancelling out long spellcasts and dumping the enemy back to the back of the turn order and so on.)
 
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